Participatory Development

In this podcast, Richard Hull says that real social innovation needs empathy and understanding of the people and context upon which we want to make a difference. Richard is the Director of the Master’s Program in Social Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths in the University of London. One of the things that I found most interesting about his program is the motto of thinking of social entrepreneurship “outside of the box”, which Richard explains during the podcast.

He describes the strong connection that exists between creativity, which is the foundation of the program, and social entrepreneurship. Particularly, even though there’s a lot of innovation, creativity, and technology that is very visible, he says that there’s a lot of work going on quietly in the background, and it is important to understand its lessons, too.

Richard talks about the example of participatory market development approaches, where the design of innovation revolves around the poorest and most marginalized people. He mentions how some western technologies are dumped in developed markets, becoming totally inappropriate. Richard highlights that it is fundamental to create the innovations with the people who are going to end up using them, rather than imposing on them.

If you’re interested in advancing sustainable development for the world’s poor, pause a moment to reflect on these two quotes:

“the very understanding of development has dramatically shifted, from a narrow focus on economic transformation (summarized by either growth rates or industrialization) to a more holistic view.” (pg. 4)

“Effective state structures have always depended on deliberative spaces that include both key actors within the state apparatus and powerful private interlocutors. In the 21st century, deliberation has become even more crucial, because the state faces a set of tasks that require bringing in deliberation in a way that goes well beyond established traditions.” (pg.51)

These ideas come from a new book, Deliberation and Development: Rethinking the Role of Voice and Collective Action in Unequal Societies, available in the World Bank’s Open Knowledge Repository. The book marries two fields that rarely intersect: deliberative democracy and development studies. The study of deliberation emerged as a critical area of study over the past two decades while the field of development has seen growing interest in community-led development and participation premised on the ability of groups to arrive at decisions and manage resources via a process of discussion and debate. Despite the growing interest in both fields, however, they have rarely engaged with one another– until now.

Patrick Heller and Vijayendra Rao edited the book, with essays from leading professors and economists working in the fields of international studies, sociology, and political science.

Local participatory development is a strategy that is being deployed by governments in developing countries to achieve a variety of socio-economic goals. These include sharpening of poverty targeting, improving service delivery, expanding livelihood opportunities and strengthening the demand for effective governance. Without doubt, an engaged citizenry involved in achieving these goals, especially in rural hinterlands, could hold the government more accountable.

According to the World Bank there are two major modalities for inducing local participation- community development and decentralization. While the former supports the efforts to bring villages, neighbourhoods or household groupings in the process of managing resources without relying on formally constituted local governments, the latter refers to efforts to strengthen village and municipal governments on both the demand and supply sides.

However, what is critical for effective as well as inclusive governance is a state- nongovernmental organization partnership wherein the ‘demand side’ enables citizen participation through access to information and empowerment. Further, that it fosters outcome oriented mechanisms for deliberative decision making at the grassroots.

Community driven development (CDD) has been a key operational strategy supported by the World Bank for more than a decade – averaging about $2 billion in lending every year and now covering more than 80 countries. By emphasizing empowerment and putting resources in the direct control of community groups, CDD’s rapid spread stems from its promise of achieving inclusive and sustainable poverty reduction. Yet despite its popularity, evidence on whether these programs work still remains limited and scattered. Recently, two significant efforts have been made by the Bank to pull together the different strands of evidence there is on CDD and provide a summary picture of what we know and what we don’t (please see What Have Been the Impacts of World Bank Community-Driven Program? and Localizing Development – Does Participation Work?). The reviews find on the positive end that CDD-type programs, when implemented properly, do well on delivering service delivery outcomes in sectors like health and education, improve resource sustainability, and help in constructing lower cost and better quality infrastructure.

A lot has recently been written about “doing development differently” from crowdsourcing the next Millennium Development Goals (a la ONE’s Jamie Drummond) to the Copenhagen Consensus and their 16 investments with the biggest payoffs for development (listed here).

Enter Ha-Joon Chang, a noted Cambridge economist, who sees development as a different game altogether –the analogy he uses is that current development thinking is like “Hamlet without the prince.” According to Duncan Green’s recent blog post, Chang believes that with all the focus on health, education, poverty reduction, we are missing the elephant in the room (the prince): We are missing what poor countries really need, which is “productive capabilities” and an important focus on upgrading skills and industry, which has largely been set aside since the 1980s by donors and international organizations.